Frederick Soddy Award

The Frederick Soddy Postgraduate Award provides up to £6,000 to support a PhD student/group of PhD students carrying out fieldwork/research on 'the study of the social, economic, and cultural life of a region’ - anywhere in the world.

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Frederick Soddy Award recipients

2014: Samuel Derbyshire (University of Oxford). 'A History of Turkana Material Culture: Tracing Change and Facing the Future with the People of the Grey Bull'

This project seeks to explore the on-going development of the Turkana people and region in Kenya. An exhaustive ethnographic investigation will be undertaken, during which Turkana material culture will be analysed as it operates in daily life. This ethnography will then be placed within its deep historical context by combining it with a range of documents and photographs spanning the 20th century.

This archival and oral history study focuses on the Kyrgyz mountainous pastoralists: scattered across Inner Asia and separated by modern national borders. The project aims to uncover how the Kyrgyz identity has adapted to various changing patterns of settlement. Evidence suggests that a number of social, economic and political factors have pushed the Kyrgyz to permanent settlement in their high-altitude alpine pastures.

2013: Kate Porter (University of East Anglia). 'Imagining Climate Control: The Case of the ‘Geoclique’ and the ‘Haida’'

This project explores the underlying ecological worldviews - signalled by ontological, epistemological and axiological assumptions - that people draw on when engaging with the idea of climate control and when reaching normative conclusions about its desirability and feasibility. Using discourse analysis, the project will explore this through two case studies: 1) the metaphorical ‘Geoclique’ and 2) residents of Haida Gwaii and employees of the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation. Both case studies are sights of visible controversy about the desirability of geoengineering interventions.

2012: Michael Musgrave (University of St Andrews). 'The Decline of the Zambezi Teak Forests of Western Zambia and the Implications for Social and Economic Development'

The Zambezi Teak forests of western Zambia have been logged for 70 years and are severely depleted. The study mapped the current and historical geographical extent of the forests and examined the social and institutional issues surrounding their management. A unique opportunity exists to make an important contribution to common–pool resource theory by examining the social, cultural and economic differences between communities living in Zambezi Teak forests in Zambia and Zimbabwe. The lessons learned from comparing the differences in managing Zambezi Teak in the two countries, will play an important role in future management of the Zambian forests.

2011: Dan Keech (University of Southampton). 'Social Enterprise and the Production of Nature'

The project studied the commercially challenging nature of orchards - the costs of husbanding often exceeds earned income. However, orchards varied biological structure represents great value to wildlife. Recent attempts by wildlife NGOs to protect orchards include experimenting with social enterprise methods (balancing commercial with social/environmental objectives) to revive orchards. This project compared influences on orchard social enterprises in Germany and England.

The project examined the social landscape of the Sahrāwī hassāniya-speaking nomads whose territory spans the whole of the western Sahara. Exploring the hidden logic of how and why this tribal nomadic pastoralists’ social adaptation has persistently survived as a powerful and dynamic system of human social behaviour and organisation, where others have weakened under climate change, post-colonial conflict and our ‘modern’ Western economic-political template.

2010: Evelyn Landerer (University of Cambridge). 'Re-Imagining the Land: Experiences of Cultural, Social and Spatial Change Among Forest Dwellers in a Region in Eastern Siberia'

The project studied a remote region of eastern Siberia, contrasting indigenous reindeer people (Evenki), who walk endlessly around the dense boreal fores, with settlement-dwelling Russians and others who engage only briefly with the forest as hunters or (recently) oil prospectors. The project analysed how each group conceptualises, perceives and orders their social, cultural and economic spaces under rapid anthropogenic change.

For further information on the projects listed above, including a summary of the research and expedition reports, please browse the Society's Expeditions Database.

About the Award

Born in 1877, Frederick Soddy was a Nobel Prize winning atomic scientist, who later in his career developed sociological interests.

Through the foundation of the Frederick Soddy Trust, he sought to encourage research that would provide a holistic view of the whole life of an area or community, encompassing both human and physical geography.

The award, which started in 2010, is administered by the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), but awarded by the Trustees of the Frederick Soddy Trust.